Yesterday Justin and I went to see the Holdovers, a movie about some private prep school boys who have to stay at school over the holidays (kind of what Harry Potter usually did). Except these boys definitely did not want to be there. Throw in an ornery teacher and a grieving cook and the holidays don’t look like they’ll be very cheerful. I don’t know, I like this movie even though it was long as fuck. There were a lot of elements to this movie. The main character’s dad is in a mental institution on Christmas which really hit home for me because I was too. But the similarities stop there. His father is a paranoid schizophrenic and he beaned an orderly over the head with a snowglobe. Tis the season. Anyway, I took issue with this because it perpetuates the stereotype that people with mental illness are violent. In reality,
very few mentally ill people are violent and mentally ill, people are more likely to be the victims of crime. But it’s so much easier to make mentally ill people out to be the bad guy because they are foreign or strange and an easy scapegoat.
This weekend a mass shooting at a hospital in New Hampshire was thwarted. The shooter was shot dead as he shot up a mental institution. Before he died he managed to kill one person. This is just despicable. The lowest of the low. Those poor patients absolutely terrified with nowhere to go. I was inpatient when I got the news about the Las Vegas shooting and we were all unsettled for a few days as the death toll trickled in. The people who commit these crimes are rarely crazy; they are evil. And it’s time we stopped making excuses and blaming mentally ill people.
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